I Am Not This Body

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body." Marcel Proust

Every
time I look at my face in a magnified mirror in a hotel bathroom, I
jump back in surprise. Seen closely, my skin looks like the surface of a
strange planet. Ridges and canyons pock my chin and lips. Forests of
tiny hairs grow from my ear lobes. Unnoticed pimples rise from my nose
like volcanoes. A sheen of oil coats the landscape. I half expect to see
alien creatures living in minute settlements in my dimples or roving
the great plains of my cheeks " and could I look at higher
magnification, I would see exactly that.

I do not identify with my body. I have a body but I am
a mind. My body and I have an intimate but awkward relationship, like
foreign roommates who share a bedroom but not a language. As the thinker
of the pair, I contemplate my body with curiosity, as a scientist might
observe a primitive species. My mind is a solitary wanderer in this
universe of bodies.

Though I identify with mind, the mind itself
is matter. I remember dissecting a fetal pig's brain in high school. As I
sliced layers of cerebellum and cerebrum, I imagined someone likewise
cutting my own brain from my skull and examining the weird intersection
of my mind and body. There I would lie in the petri dish, the whole
mystery of my being made visible, the unutterable complexities of
consciousness, thought and personality reduced to a three-pound mass of
squiggly pink tissue. Hello, self. Where is the vaporous soul I am said
to be, the exiled child of God from another world? This looks, rather,
like some Martian's bizarre pet.

Last summer I visited the beach
on a busy holiday weekend. I never saw so much flesh: I saw more flesh
than sand. Sunbathers hung over the sides or out the bottoms of their
swimsuits. Sleeping old men roasted their round bellies then flipped
like rotisserie chickens. I weaved through a jumbled Picasso of
bellybuttons, nipples, sagging breasts, hairy backs and jiggling thighs,
most the color and texture of greasy orange leather. I gave thanks
that, besides at beaches, society requires clothes.

Plato called
the body the prison of the soul. Perhaps our societal prejudice against
obesity is a variant of that ancient prejudice against the flesh.
Obesity is too much matter. Watching a skinny model strut down a runway,
the audience studies the elegant geometry of her shape, shape being
matter's abstract and immaterial container. But an obese body waddling
down a sidewalk conveys an absence of shape, like formless matter before
the logos tamed it at creation.

Ever since the first man and
woman sewed fig leaves for their loins, human beings have been
embarrassed by their bodies. Going to school without clothes is an
archetypal nightmare of children. Public nudity is grounds for arrest.
Clothing's purpose is not only to keep us warm but to keep us concealed,
shielding us more from shame than rain. Our plight is having a higher
standard of beauty than our bodies can match; we are pickier than our
maker.

We are especially embarrassed by the inside of our bodies.
Mucus, sweat, gas, feces, vomit, urine, saliva, earwax " does any
desirable substance emerge from our depths? Whatever comes from inside
the body is like a foul messenger from the underworld, whom we fear to
encounter. What wife does not wince at the stench of her husband's
morning breath? What teenager is not scandalized to hear his girlfriend
on the toilet the first time?

Like our buttocks, breasts and
genitals, all our interior regions are private parts. When a nurse pins
my X-rays to a hospital wall, I am taken aback. If we blush to be seen
without clothes, how much more to be seen without skin? Examining my
horror of mutilation " femurs poking from thighs and intestines spilling
from abdomens in a war scene, or industrial cattle being ground to
ribbons of beef in a meat plant" I find, at root, an instinctive shame
and fear of having one's guts revealed.

Squeamishness about
bodies contributes much to the fear of death. Were death merely
annihilation " the quiet snuffing out of consciousness " it might almost
possess a sublime, philosophic poetry. But the accompanying facts of
physical decay are merely vile. Dying, we gasp for air and cough blood
and vomit, and waste to shriveled remnants of ourselves. After death,
bad gets worse, as our rotting organs seep noxious fumes and make
mansions for maggots. I only had to read one book about putrefaction
before deciding that I would be cremated when I died. Cremation is the
soul's way of death, the closest the mind can come to annihilating the
spent body. Let fire evaporate me, not worms liquefy me. Cremation,
whatever its terrors, at least is clean.

Besides being squeamish
about physicality, I resent how matter lords it over mind. Plato says in
one of his dialogues, "Soul is the master, and matter its natural
subject." I agree that it ought to be so, but the facts are opposite.
Whenever I get sick or injured, I am dismayed to discover how little
control I have of my life. Because someone sneezed a germ too small to
see into my bloodstream, my universe shrinks to a pillow and sheets. The
mere calcium of my ankle, by breaking inopportunely, can cancel a
carefully planned and paid-for vacation. My relation to my body
resembles a privy council's relation to an adolescent king. I am
thoughtful and wise and know best what to do, but my capricious body
possesses the power and final authority, and I must tiptoe round its
whims.

I am always unnerved to hear of a mind of genius"a Nobel
laureate or great mathematician"killed in a car crash. Is it not strange
that someone so intelligent should be so helpless against mindless
metal? In a contest between genius and steel panel, amazingly steel
panel wins. The mind's outward creation, culture, is similarly frail.
Centuries of intellectual labor filled the Library of Alexandria, which
illiterate fire burned down in a few hours. Eons of human progress could
end next year with the smash of an errant meteor. Plato's Great Chain
of Being got hung upside down, for rocks hold sway over humanity.

Granted,
it is not entirely fair to criticize matter as stupid. The human body,
in keeping itself alive, does a vastly better job than any conscious
effort could. How long would I last if I were put at the controls of my
physical existence? Fumbling uncertainly with hundreds of thousands of
levers, I would go blue from forgetting to breathe, then, remembering,
would faint from meanwhile letting my pulse drop. Faced with the endless
critical and absurdly complicated tasks of circulating blood, digesting
food, interpreting retinal images and fighting bacteria, how would I
ever find time to repair sunburned skin cells, grow hair or process the
occasional nerve signal from my toes? Doctors go to school until they
are 30 to learn a fraction of the great manual of life that an infant's
body knows at birth.

Nevertheless, this intelligence of bodies is
cold and alienating. I recall the sense of eeriness I felt several
years ago when learning computer science, the eeriness of discovering
the lifeless corridors of binary digits and microprocessors beneath the
monitor's meaningful display. The facade of humanized banners, buttons
and icons on our screens masks an unstaffed control center of electrical
switches, clicking on and off, their changing patterns of charges
translating miraculously but mindlessly into the streaming wonders of
words and colors we perceive.

So, too, pry behind the rich
graphics flashing across the screen of being"the self-organizing of
galaxies, the coordination of ecosystems, and the complexity of
biological life"and you arrive at the imbecilic machinery of it all,
electrons flowing through the circuit boards of the stars, motors
whirring on the hard drives of our bodies. Beneath the intelligible
there is only the unintelligent, a blank stare behind beautiful eyes,
muteness behind the music.

Brian Jay Stanley's essays have
appeared in Pleiades, North American Review, The Antioch Review and
elsewhere. He lives in Asheville, N.C. More of his work can be found on his Web site.